entry 1307
There are a lot of people on the right defending the legacy of Augusto Pinochet. This is to be expected -- the right wing is filled with fatuous, power-worshipping sycophants willing to eat the shit of an authoritarian fascist and call it progress.
Even the supposedly "liberal" Washington Post ran an editorial praising Pinochet's legacy and, as is the fasion, contrasting it against the fairly meaningless comparison of Fidel Catro's Cuba. [Briefly: Salvador Allende was not equivalent to Fidel Castro, and it's hard to achieve any kind of "economic miracle" under a decades-long and nearly universally reviled U.S. embargo.]
Through it all, the defense of Pinochet comes down to little more than the current revision of the classic refrain: "he made the trains run on time."
This is, of course, a load of crap.
Greg Palast takes the myth of Pinochet's economic miracle apart nicely:Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.
All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.
Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.
In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia...
As they say on the blogs, read the whole thing.
Even the supposedly "liberal" Washington Post ran an editorial praising Pinochet's legacy and, as is the fasion, contrasting it against the fairly meaningless comparison of Fidel Catro's Cuba. [Briefly: Salvador Allende was not equivalent to Fidel Castro, and it's hard to achieve any kind of "economic miracle" under a decades-long and nearly universally reviled U.S. embargo.]
Through it all, the defense of Pinochet comes down to little more than the current revision of the classic refrain: "he made the trains run on time."
This is, of course, a load of crap.
Greg Palast takes the myth of Pinochet's economic miracle apart nicely:Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.
All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.
Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.
In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia...
As they say on the blogs, read the whole thing.